Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.
This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."
Comment: I was given this book for my birthday. I now see this is a very famous author in the US but I confess the name was not familiar to me before I had the book in my hands.
In this memoir book, the author describes her days and what was going on through her mind after the death of her husband. The memoir is filled with personal memories as expected, but also include a lot of sources the author checked while grieving, as well as reflections on many aspects of her life, especially since her daughter was ill at the same time all this was happening...
I've found the narrative to be fluid and easy and the author has a distinctive voice, for certain. Reading this book has made me interested in knowing more about the author and her work, as well as her family (my edition includes one family photo of the three of them in the late 1970s) and I admit I spent some time reading articles and Wikipedia pages online too. It's interesting to think about this now, but I really had no idea about the identity of these writers (the author and her husband), and for that reason alone, this was worth it.
The theme clearly might not be for everyone... the author describes the events and the following days after her husband dies at home and how the emergency services tried to help. What is being described isn't easy, but I will say something: to me, despite the theme and the exhaustive reading the author did on the subject (of mourning and grief and coping) which she includes in her text, I was not emotionally touched by what was being said.
I can't tell if this was intentional or just the author's writing style in general, but what she was telling, obviously hard for what it meant to her, was not as emotionally charged for me. I got the sensation her style was direct, clean but perhaps a little too polished. Again, I can't say what the intention was, but I didn't finish the book with the notion this was meant for me to cry or to feel her her pain, or perhaps I just could not be in the right mood to think of her words this way...
The book isn't long, and it's focused on the year after her husband dies and how some thoughts did escape the usual for her, such as when she describes she couldn't give away his clothes, because he might come back. This isn't possible, of course, but our mind does travel into weird roads and when this is being described, I thought the book would go into more personal impressions, but no. Things did remain a little too detached to me, and while I could appreciate the beauty and even the poetry of some passages, I was a little disappointed this wasn't... more impressive.
As I've said, the author includes many sources she checked (medical and literary) to try to organize her thoughts on what she was feeling and how she was meant to react. I liked how methodical this was and how linked these ideas were to what was going through her mind (like in a dissertation in which we need to include all sources to base any idea on). However, this only added to that feeling of detachment, and in how this looked more a professional text on mourning and not a true biography, so... I can't say much more without repeating myself.
Reading other (higher ranking) reviews and even having the opinion of someone who has also lost her husband and could not read this because of the memories it evoked, I might also reach the conclusion I don't yet have the experience to resonate with what mrs Didion is saying. I can grasp the basics of the message, as most human beings would when thinking about the concept of losing a loved one, but even though I've lost family members, I have not lost a husband and, in a small way, perhaps that might make a difference.
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